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PostPosted: 16 Jul 2018, 08:23 
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CheetahSupporter wrote:
Talisman wrote:
Hi @CheetahSupporter, that's great info. Thanks!

You wouldn't happen to have similar insights into the various A-G loadouts and configurations that were operationally cleared on the C's..?

I'll see if I can find anything - but I was on Avionics, and missiles need a whole lot more Avionic interfacing than dumb bombs (or LGBs, which are carried and released as if they are dumb bombs.)



Awesome, thanks!


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PostPosted: 22 Jul 2018, 06:21 
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Talisman wrote:
CheetahSupporter wrote:
I'll see if I can find anything - but I was on Avionics, and missiles need a whole lot more Avionic interfacing than dumb bombs (or LGBs, which are carried and released as if they are dumb bombs.)
Awesome, thanks!

Sorry - I thought I had scans of some pages of the pilot's manual but can't find anything. I had paper copies of Stores Management System load-list pages but they were ditched long ago.


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PostPosted: 23 Jul 2018, 08:12 
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CheetahSupporter wrote:
Talisman wrote:
CheetahSupporter wrote:
I'll see if I can find anything - but I was on Avionics, and missiles need a whole lot more Avionic interfacing than dumb bombs (or LGBs, which are carried and released as if they are dumb bombs.)
Awesome, thanks!

Sorry - I thought I had scans of some pages of the pilot's manual but can't find anything. I had paper copies of Stores Management System load-list pages but they were ditched long ago.



No worries, thanks for having a look :)


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PostPosted: 18 Jul 2019, 14:42 
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From published pics, it seems the radar is an EL/M-2032. I don't think EL-2035 was actually completed to production.

The HUD is also Israeli in origin - the upfront controller incorporated into the HUD is an El-op (Elbit) design identical to that in the Lavi and the Chengdu J-10. Interestingly El-op licensed both Hughes (Lavi) and Kaiser (Phantom 2000) diffractive optics for their HUDs - without better screenshots of the optical section its hard to say if Cheetah's HUD is using either of these or if El-op developed their own optics.

The MFDs seem to be the 2 monochrome displays from the Lavi, which had 2 monochrome and 1 colour display. J-10 got the colour display as well - China must have had more money.


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PostPosted: 18 Jul 2019, 15:54 
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Thanks Overscan, those are some great insights. Much appreciated!


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PostPosted: 19 Jul 2019, 21:38 
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The Cheetah C MFDs are not the same model. Judging from the photo Dean took of the sim some years back, the upper left MFD was a monochrome raster display and the lower central MFD is a colour (likely shadow mask CRT) display.


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PostPosted: 10 Aug 2019, 07:57 
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Darren wrote:
The Cheetah C MFDs are not the same model. Judging from the photo Dean took of the sim some years back, the upper left MFD was a monochrome raster display and the lower central MFD is a colour (likely shadow mask CRT) display.
You're partially right - Cheetah C had a monochrome MFD on the left and a coulour MFD (MFCD) in the middle. The MFCD was a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beam-index_tube beam index display rather than shadow mask - beam index CRTs give higher brightness for the same power than shadow mask, even so the Cheetah C MFCD got bloody hot, and I think included its own cooling fan (not certain about that).


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PostPosted: 10 Aug 2019, 08:19 
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There are some photos I posted in 2012 of Cheetah C and D cockpits on this topic: http://www.saairforce.co.za/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=4722&p=47786&hilit=cockpit#p47786

Frame grabs from Cheetah C MFD and MFCD video tape are linked here: http://www.saairforce.co.za/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=7810&hilit=video

And Frame grabs from Cheetah D are linked here: http://www.saairforce.co.za/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=7814&hilit=video

Unfortunately a topic I created with Cheetah C HUD grabs (linked on the above two topics) appears to have been deleted - not sure who I offended! But if you follow the PhotoBucket links in the above topics, the HUD video grabs are also still available there.


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PostPosted: 12 Aug 2019, 11:03 
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CheetahSupporter wrote:
There are some photos I posted in 2012 of Cheetah C and D cockpits on this topic: http://www.saairforce.co.za/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=4722&p=47786&hilit=cockpit#p47786

Frame grabs from Cheetah C MFD and MFCD video tape are linked here: http://www.saairforce.co.za/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=7810&hilit=video

And Frame grabs from Cheetah D are linked here: http://www.saairforce.co.za/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=7814&hilit=video

Unfortunately a topic I created with Cheetah C HUD grabs (linked on the above two topics) appears to have been deleted - not sure who I offended! But if you follow the PhotoBucket links in the above topics, the HUD video grabs are also still available there.

How on earth did I miss this! Thank you for providing these, along with the information on the MFD. As it's a beam index CRT it's not the part I originally thought it was.


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PostPosted: 12 Aug 2019, 11:27 
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Brilliant stuff! Thanks guys.


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PostPosted: 13 Aug 2019, 12:03 
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Darren wrote:
How on earth did I miss this!
I'm not surprised you missed it - it took me half an hour to find it and I knew I had posted it! Even so one of the three pages was missing.


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PostPosted: 15 Aug 2019, 10:22 
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Darren wrote:
Thank you for providing these, along with the information on the MFD. As it's a beam index CRT it's not the part I originally thought it was.
Here's another (long) technical snippet - the MFD (monochrome) was raster driven (line by line like a TV) but the MFCD (colour) was stroke driven, similar to the HUD to get better brightness. But this made in-flight recording a real bugger - for recording purposes, the MFCD had to generate a duplicate of the MFCD display with raster format since that's all the V250 video recorder could use.

In fact, the obstacles to recording MFCD were even worse than that - the MFDP, which drove MFD and MFCD, could only generate monochrome video, so the TSD (Tactical Situation Display = colour Map) was recorded as a frame of Red, a frame of Green, a frame of Blue. And if the pilot was recording two video sources simultaneously things were even more messy (frame of Red, frame of monochrome, frame of Green, frame of monochrome, frame of Blue, frame of monochrome frame of Red, etc.) After the mission, for debriefing purposes the VRGE took the output of the video player and capture and identified the different video frames, combined Red, Green, Blue for a colour image if necessary, and routed the images to Left or Right monitor for the pilot to view.


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PostPosted: 08 Feb 2021, 03:21 
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overscan wrote:
The HUD is also Israeli in origin . . . Interestingly El-op licensed both Hughes (Lavi) and Kaiser (Phantom 2000) diffractive optics for their HUDs - without better screenshots of the optical section its hard to say if Cheetah's HUD is using either of these or if El-op developed their own optics.
I believe that the HUD was a Kaiser design. I remember being told that it was essentially the same as the Cheetah D / Cheetah E part except that Cheetah C had a dual combiner which gave bigger vertical field of view. This is somewhat speculative, I don't claim to be a WDNS expert.


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PostPosted: 13 Feb 2021, 22:55 
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